Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [49]
If I had been Tex, I think I might have gotten off the campus as fast as possible, and maybe drowned my sorrows among the nonacademics at the Black Cat Café. That was where I was going to wind up that afternoon. It would have been funny in retrospect if we had wound up as a couple of sloshed buddies at the Black Cat Café.
IMAGINE MY SAYING to him or his saying to me, both of us drunk as skunks, “I love you, you old son of a gun. Do you know that?”
ONE TRUSTEE HAD it in for me on personal grounds. That was Sydney Stone, who was said to have amassed a fortune of more than $1,000,000,000 in 10 short years, mainly in commissions for arranging sales of American properties to foreigners. His masterpiece, maybe, was the transfer of ownership of my father’s former employer, E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, to I. G. Farben in Germany.
“There is much I could probably forgive, if somebody put a gun to my head, Professor Hartke,” he said, “but not what you did to my son.” He himself was no Tarkingtonian. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics.
“Fred?” I said.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” he said, “I have only 1 son in Tarkington. I have only 1 son anywhere.” Presumably this 1 son, without having to lift a finger, would himself 1 day have $1,000,000,000.
“What did I do to Fred?” I said.
“You know what you did to Fred,” he said.
What I had done to Fred was catch him stealing a Tarkington beer mug from the college bookstore. What Fred Stone did was beyond mere stealing. He took the beer mug off the shelf, drank make-believe toasts to me and the cashier, who were the only other people there, and then walked out.
I had just come from a faculty meeting where the campus theft problem had been discussed for the umpteenth time. The manager of the bookstore told us that only one comparable institution had a higher percentage of its merchandise stolen than his, which was the Harvard Coop in Cambridge.
So I followed Fred Stone out to the Quadrangle. He was headed for his Kawasaki motorcycle in the student parking lot. I came up behind him and said quietly, with all possible polite-ness, “I think you should put that beer mug back where you got it, Fred. Either that or pay for it.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Is that what you think?” Then he smashed the mug to smithereens on the rim of the Vonnegut Memorial Fountain. “If that’s what you think,” he said, “then you’re the one who should put it back.”
I reported the incident to Tex Johnson, who told me to forget it.
But I was mad. So I wrote a letter about it to the boy’s father, but never got an answer until the Board meeting.
“I can never forgive you for accusing my son of theft,” the father said. He quoted Shakespeare on behalf of Fred. I was supposed to imagine Fred’s saying it to me.
“ ‘Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing,’ ” he said. “ ‘’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands,’ ” he went on, “ ‘but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.’ ”
“If I was wrong, sir, I apologize,” I said.
“Too late,” he said.
17
THERE WAS 1 Trustee I was sure was my friend. He would have found what I said on tape funny and interesting. But he wasn’t there. His name was Ed Bergeron, and we had had a lot of good talks about the deterioration of the environment and the abuses of trust in the stock market and the banking industry and so on. He could top me for pessimism any day.
His wealth was as old as the Moellenkamps’, and was based on ancestral oil fields and coal mines and railroads which he had sold to foreigners in order to devote himself full-time to nature study and conservation. He was President of the Wildlife Rescue Federation, and his photographs of wildlife on the Galapagos Islands had been published in National Geographic. The magazine gave him the cover, too, which showed a marine iguana digesting seaweed